Thursday, March 18, 2010

I feel like the genders have been damaged, on purpose, in order to make them a 'match' for each other. By damaged, I mean that each side has been told to do and be something, rather than a normal, thinking, feeling purpose, solely so that someone can fill a role that by rights, they should be fulfilling on their own. It's a sort of... "You won't be liked for yourself; you'll be liked based on standards." So men try to be useful, and women try to be pretty, and neither of them focus on what they'd do if they ever convinced a mate to be interested in them.

It's stupid. Any man worth pining for has more nuanced interests than breast size, and most won't run out on a romance because you're average rather than pretty. Any woman worth lusting after isn't going to spend her entire childhood learning to look pretty--because once you and she are past the banging stage and gotten settled down, all those years she dedicated to looking pretty are either going to be no longer useful, or else she's cheating on you. Well, movie stars excepted, I suppose.

Now mostly, I think, men get the better side of that deal. On the other hand, men are supposed to be easily seduced--that's the whole point of the "women looking good" obsession, after all. Look good, get a man, end of story. If the man is married happily, well then, ruin his life, because he's supposed to still be seduceable. Oh, that panicked look on his face where he feels the bonds that are precious to him slipping away? He'll get over it. After all, you have tits. Whoo.

And then there's women. Okay, you got a guy, you got married, maybe you even got a kid, maybe the kid's even grown. If you fell for the stupid bullshit, you now no longer have any purpose, even though you're still alive. What do you do? Look pretty again? Have more kids? You didn't spend your formative years on something silly like, you know, hobbies, or ambitions, or a career.

Are people actually like this? No. Fortunately, even the worst cases will likely hit a hard time, fall out of the storybook, and land on their feet, even if they scrape their knees on the way down. The point isn't that people are forever scarred by this, it's that the feeling is there, and frankly speaking, that feeling does not trust human beings to be human beings. It does not trust them to be able to deal with the opposite sex in a rational way, in spite of thousands of years of breeding, and it tries to force them to be something they're not. Most people, except maybe a crazed subset, will end up normal in the end, because normal is the way humans were designed.

But I'd like to see something better in this world--I'd like to see a place where people weren't expected by friends, relatives, and suitors to be something other than humans with their own thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and standards. I don't know what I can do to help the world be like that, but I'll certainly try to do my part.

But it's really not all that easy. After all, I, too, like tits. Guess I must just be a man.